Clem Cole:
Also to be fair, Dennis did symlinks before 4.2. They were part of the V8
I believe.
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I'm pretty sure they came from Berkeley nevertheless. I don't know
the exact order of events, but the 8th Edition kernel was essentially
that from one of the later 4.1x BSDs, hacked in 1127 to remove sockets
and FFS (were they even there yet), then to add Dennis's stream I/O
system, Tom Killian's original /proc, and Peter Weinberger's neta
network-file-system client. Perhaps a few other hooks as well.
Symlinks were already there, and although we made some limited careful
use of them, made nobody very happy because they made such a big
irregular lump in so many things: file system no longer a tree,
difference between stat and lstat, and so on.
One thing 8/e did differently from Berkeley was that ls by default
hid symlinks rather than trotting them out proudly. If f was a
symlink, ls -l f showed the state of the target file, not that of
the link; one had to do ls -lL f to see the symlink itself.
That reflected a general feeling that symlinks should be neither
seen nor heard unless necessary.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON